What happened to the unsolved serial murder case in Shinjuku’s “Love Hotel”?

In Japan, love hotels have always been popular, convenient, romantic, and highly confidential. In the 1980s, the booming Tokyo, Japan, had a large number of love hotels. The Shinjuku area is known as Kabukicho in Japan and is a place of entertainment. Shinjuku, Tokyo, in the 1980s, had become an international entertainment destination with a large foreign population. It is the high spending and drunken entertainment that attracts many young Japanese women.

In the bustling place of Shinjuku, there is a quiet and mysterious place hidden: the love hotel area. There are many private hotels catering exclusively for men and women. On the morning of March 20, 1981, staff at a love hotel here discovered that the check-out time was approaching for a room whose occupants did not want to check out at all. This is rare in love hotels, and most people choose to check out early. The employee realized something might be wrong and opened the door when no one answered. Unexpectedly, a woman was strangled to death. Since there is a victim behind, let’s call her Woman A. The police quickly arrived to investigate and learned from the woman's business card that he was a 33-year-old club staff member. However, careful investigation later revealed that woman A was using a pseudonym and her actual age was 45 years old. The case reached a deadlock because the man who came with her left early, leaving no valuable clues.

An in-depth investigation of Woman A reveals her tragic life. A was born in Kobe and came here at the age of 22 with the dream of Tokyo. In the club, Woman A met a married man. The man divorced and soon married Woman A. They had a son. After the marriage, the financial situation of the two was not optimistic, and Woman A was forced to return to work in the nightclub. Since then, her husband and son have been bedridden and under tremendous stress. Perhaps it is really unbearable that a woman abandons her husband and son alone. Soon, her husband and son both died of illness. One woman later returned to Tokyo and continued working in the nightclub until she was killed.

When police investigated her home, they found a note with the dates of her husband and son's deaths, as well as her husband's tie clip and photos of her son that she had saved. This seems to be a woman filled with painful memories. More than a month later, on April 25, another woman was killed. Woman B checked into a love hotel with a man at 9pm and left early an hour later. The staff thought there might be a problem and went to the room to inquire, but found the body of Woman B. Woman B, who is about 20 years old, left no clues about her identity at the scene. No one knows who she is or where she comes from. Police released photos of her across the country but were unable to identify her. To this day, Ms. B remains unidentified.

More than a month later, on June 14, a third case occurred. The victim is C, 17 years old, from Saitama Prefecture. After graduating from high school, the woman became addicted and frequented nightclubs. However, by this time she already had an official boyfriend, a boy who worked at a gas station. Their parents have given permission for them to get married. On the day of the incident, woman C played billiards with her boyfriend and went home early. He took her to the subway station and left. Unexpectedly, a few hours later, woman C was killed in the love hotel. No one knows why C left her boyfriend and went to a love hotel, and no one knows who the murderer is.

Three similar cases occurred one after another, causing panic in the area. Unexpectedly, on June 27, such a thing happened again. Of course, the 30-year-old woman D met a 1.6-meter-tall working-class man while killing time in an arcade, and the two decided to go to a love hotel. Upon arrival, the man suddenly attacked her and attempted to strangle her. The woman resisted vigorously, and the man took the money and ran away.

Since then, the serial killings in love hotels have stopped. Because the hotel is so private, the staff cannot find out the identity of the guest. In the 1980s, due to limited investigative tools, the Shinjuku area was in chaos and the police were unable to find criminals based on the clues they had. Of course, since the victims were identified as nightclub workers, no one paid attention to their deaths, and the unsolved cases were slowly forgotten.